A Spiritual Workout - Yearning for the Life

 

 

Last week, a friend of mine mused out loud that he thought he might give up Lent for Lent. Just Lent. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but it may be the thought that Lent just doesn’t work for many people and, if that’s what he meant, I think he might be right. The whole idea of giving up something, or even of doing something extra, for 40 days just doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t if we just look on the face of it. It seems kind of silly. Until we do it in earnest, trying to look at it from God’s point of view.

Jesus gave some pretty simple instructions:

First, He said, "Follow me." The early disciples did it. They left nets and families and literally traipsed along beside him. They traveled and listened and learned. We are supposed to do that, too. 

Then, He said, (paraphrased) "Do what I do." Or more correctly, "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I say?" That's a good question and I have an answer. Two of them. Because I'm human and because it's hard. But I keep forgetting something important. 

Being human isn't just something "only". Being human is being designed by God in the pattern of God. Being human means that we are more than flesh and blood. Being human means that we are infused with longing for perfect love, unfailing trust and justice, and an assurance that what we endure in this life ends in a condition that is beautiful and complete. It doesn't matter whether a person believes in God or not. We all want these things. The thing is that if we're ever going to get them, we have to DO something.

I broke my arm in mid-November and it's taken me until mid-February to regain most of my ability to do the things I used to do. In the meantime, I was necessarily sedentary and lost a lot of strength and vitality. Now that most of my maneuverabilty is back, I have to start moving  - yoga, dance, lifting weights, stretching. All that stuff. Not stuff usually on the top of my list for fun, but I know what the result is, having been this way before. I will become a person more fit for the life I want to lead. It's not the body I'm after. It's the life.

The same goes for my spiritual life. I have to spend time in the spiritual gym to prepare myself for the spiritual life I want and quite simply, as far as I'm concerned, there is no spiritual quest but the one toward more of God. More grace. More joy. More union. And I'm convinced that's what he wants for me. "The kingdom of God is in you". And I want to let it out.

God will do lots of things for us, but this is something WE have to do. 

So what equipment is in our spiritual gym? For me in this season, the weight I have to lift is restraint. Self control. Self denial. Jesus said that "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." He meant it. The qualites that make this life most worthwhile are not those that amuse and satisfy ourselves. They are the long-term struggles that we can look back on and know that we have done something lasting and worthwhile. Neither doing a job well or raising children is fun most of the time, but afterward, we know we have done what is right and builds up not only our own world but the world of the people around us. 

Spiritual weightlifting is like that. Restraint, that is holding back our power and abilities to achieve something greater, is like that. And Lent is kind of the kindergarten for restraint. It puts restraint in a box for a time and tells us, "Don't do this destructive thing. Do this other thing that builds up for eternity. Do this other thing that will still matter tomorrow and will not build a thing you keep for yourself but will build a thing you share with God."

So Lent is kind of silly if all you do is stop drinking coffee or stop eating your daily M&Ms, but it's not silly if we can take the larger view. After all, God isn't ever small. We have to aim high and climb if we're ever going to get closer to Him.

Image: Terri Gillespie

The Dream that Doesn't Die

 

I'm going to see Bob Dylan live in concert for the first time on March 30. In preparation for that, I've been listening to what I hope will be, before then, all of his music, knowing that I'd missed so much of it after the early 70s. I want to hear all his music in order before then and now that I'm pretty far into it, am finding him sunk in some places deep into what sounds like a real life exposure to Desolation Row.

Listening to the music and how it changed along the way, I'm trying to figure out what happened. He got lost somehow. Something vital drained away. He deflated away into a memory of the inspired genius that had made him someone we looked toward for a glimpse of what we might be - outraged at the venality and mediocrity of a world we knew could be better - a constant prodding toward beauty and the glory of humankind - a voice that said not 'get more' but 'be better', 'think', 'act'. A command to not only 'love' (if loving could ever be an only) but 'Be love'. 'Be real.' 

And then it all stopped. Or more like it, braked to a gradual, deflating stop. It took years for him but it happened, I'm thinking, to the rest of us, too.

That's why the 60s were special. That time has been called a brief, shining moment for some of us. There were real palpable dreams for the possibility of what we might be. And what we might be had faces - Jack. Bobby. Martin.  

In the end, they had to die, of course. Mediocrity is jealous. It does not harbor excellence or dreams of egalitarian glory.  Glory, because it reminds us of what we cannot hold in our hands or even easily imagine, has to die, too. Jesus should have helped us remember that but although his name is often evoked, what he taught never quite caught on in spite of the crowds still in churches every week. 

Glory necessitates reaching beyond flesh and blood - not only beyond our own grasp but beyond our comprehension, forced to be content with desiring most what we can only approach but never attain. 

Dylan wasn't the only one who lost it. We all did, but some of us never stopped looking for it again - the beauty that just seeped away. Everyone looked in different places and some got lost in drugs or in corporate striving. Me, as it turned out - I went to Italy. I remembered the beauty of the Renaissance and recognized it as what we'd grabbed by the tail once long ago. There, I could literally reach out and touch genius, the kind of genius that is supernatural or metaphysical. More than flesh and blood. More even than mind.

Once that kind of genius is actually touched, even for a little while, everything else looks small and insufficient, because it is. I am still disappointed in the everyday that does not aspire to lift human souls to what can only be termed a kind of heaven. And that's what I saw in Italy. In the Farnese Hercules, I saw the disillusionment of doing what we think will make things right and finding that it doesn't:

In Michaelangelo's David and the ceiling of the Sistine, I saw physical representations of the discovery of human glory:

In Donatello's Magdalen, I see how these glorious discoveries can ruin flesh, can throw what we are and what we could be into a conflagration that cannot be resolved:

And this is where we are left today. The beauty of what we are made to be still calls. It's harder to get near now because we have no one alive who knows how to lead there, but the yearning still lives, and not just in this old hippy's heart, but in so many people who have been born to ask questions and wonder why the world is the way it is. I still believe that the dream of glory never dies. 

"You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.: - Bob Dylan said that.

First Image: Stereo Times

Old Lady Racing: How to get out of a Speeding Ticket

 

Back in the 80s, I used to drive a race car. Of course, that was then. These days, I don't have nearly as heavy a foot as I used to, although ironically, my street cars are more powerful. That's just the way cars (not trucks or SUVs - those don't count in my world) are made these days. 350HP and doubly aspirated, but with a two-body trunk and a back seat that easily accepts a car seat. Go figure. 

Driving is a weird thing. For some, it's independence. For some, it's just a way to get somewhere. For others, like me, it's like holding onto a hurricane. When I press the ignition button in my cockpit, feeling again the push of pistons against the fire that moves them and hearing the low growl of heat and air moving through the system, I smile. Something will happen when I step on the accelerator. Yes.

Then there are those days, of course, when a little too much happens. That's another thing about my car. It has plenty of power, but wears it secretly, hiding behind efficient mufflers and noise dampeners. Sneaky. And just a little dangerous. 

Like when I pull up alongside 4 16-year-olds in a convertible 5L Mustang on a sunny summer day. Grandma in her sedan. Ha. I've had two of them. Sneaky sportscars. The first was an SHO. Yowser, it was fun. Pure muscle and guile:

Until a truck nosed its way into somewhere he didn't belong and power couldn't get me out of:

That was a sad day. So I got a hot rod Lincoln. Ahh....

So when the light turned green for me and the Mustang, I'm a quarter mile down the road before they've left the light. Oh my, that feels good.

Not so good, though, when there's a patrol car up ahead with a not-so-friendly county sheriff in it. It's happened more than once, and I don't like that part one bit. These days, however, I have a secret weapon. 

My granddaughter, Autumn. 

She's gotten me out of two tickets. She didn't mean to, of course, but she sure did it.

The first time, she was in her car seat in the back. I'd just pulled out on the highway on the first leg of what was to be our first road trip together and just before engaging the cruise control, he caught me. Way too fast, like 20 miles or so too fast. 

"Why is the policeman coming here, Grandma?"

"To keep us safe, honey."  Yeah, right. 

I rolled down the window, smiled, and handed him my license. Then he saw Autumn in the back seat. 

"I want to be a policeman!" she told him. That's all it took. He scolded me and let me go. Well done, girl.

It happened last Friday, too, and this time Autumn wasn't even in the car. Going only 12 miles over on a minor highway in a small Wisconsin town was enough to trigger the blue lights, though. 

"Where are you going?" 

"To my granddaughter's choir concert."

"Where is it?"

"Salem School." He knew the school was just down the street. It was a test. And again, he sent me on my way. 

Score. Not so bad for a grandma driving a sneaky sportscar. It's been more than 5 years since I've gotten a speeding ticket. I don't look too dangerous, after all. And Autumn surely doesn't. Good thing they can't read my mind. 

Please excuse me while I do a few donuts. 

It's Ash Wednesday - So What's Burning?

 

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday.
“Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.”

The celebrant rubs ashes on our forehead and we are supposed to be reminded of our sins and that we will, like it or not, eventually die. With that in mind, we then enter into six weeks of reflection that’s often marked by giving something up, or sometimes taking up a new practice intended to bring us closer to God, and these are good things. Often, however, if we’re honest, it’s just another season in the church marked by different colors, different customs, different routines and not much else.

The dust thing is interesting, though. In this context, dust means two things. The first is the dirt that God took up to make the first human being. So dust means dirt, but here it also means ashes, the grit and fluff that's left over when something is burned. Here, what's burned is supposed to be us and the dust referred to is connected with feelings of disappointment or disillusionment and with the ancient practice of visible humility. Job threw ashes on himself when his family had all been struck down. It is a symbol of great mourning, often intensified by the wearing of sackcloth, an intentionally uncomfortable, scratchy garment made of goat’s hair supposed to remind the wearer of their sins. It was painful on purpose. Sackcloth and ashes. 

But there is another recurring theme in the Bible connected with this practice, the idea of dying, specifically dying to self. Burning is a particularly final way of ending something. What is burned is pretty much completely destroyed and along with our former sinful ways, we are encouraged to not only get rid of our wrongful deeds, we are supposed to get rid of everything - EVERYTHING - that separates us from God and, contrary to what some say, it's not only sin that does this. 

In addition to what we do that we know is wrong when we do it, although this is a big obvious roadblock to a life with God, we also have to understand what we did in ignorance that we should not have done. If I think the speed limit is 50 but it's 35, the policeman still gets to give me a ticket for going too fast. Ignorance is not an excuse. Not really a sin, but still not OK. The attachments we form with other people that loom larger than God. A degree of busyness that gets in the way of our devotional life. Desire and addiction of almost any kind. We lose our focus and as a consequence, we lose God. 

So, what's burning is us? Our ego.  Whatever part of our humanity that interferes with the narrow way. That's why it's narrow. Not because it's exclusive, but because it's hard and takes work. However, we are a New Testament people, forgiven in Christ. We don’t put on sackcloth and ashes anymore, but there is symbolism here that can be useful to us, too. Rather than concentrating on our sins, we look to our transformation in Christ. The dust and ashes, the knowledge of all the times we have fallen short and need forgiveness is still important, but not for its sense of loss or hopelessness. We bury our old lives, yes, but as we do so we look to the new one. We die to something we thought we loved for the sake of something better so that we can embrace a newer life, a more perfect life in God. There is Lent, but there is also Easter. 

image: Vecteezy

The Arrow vs. the Circle - The Shape of the World

 One of the most enduring ideas I learned in college is that not everyone thinks like I do. 

It's true. And in all likelihood, they don't think like you do, either. This goes way past contemporary journalistic and talk show fodder about a divided country or prevailing politics. It goes all the way down to the how we think the world is made and the way it works beyond physics and biochemistry. It's about the nature of living things and, adjunctly, what we can expect or not expect in the process of living. Overall, there are two basic ideologies that not only dictate how we live, but they also dictate how we think.

The Arrow

The first way of looking at the world is as a straight line. Having a specific beginning and a specific ending, this view is most common in Western cultures (eg: ours) and most often coupled with a world governed by duality. That is, this world knows two opposing forces, each one working against the other to cause tension in our everyday lives. Right and wrong, good and evil, constantly at war with each other to the point that  determining one from the other and choosing rightly so as to live as decent a life as we can muster occupies a great deal of our time. 

In this scheme, whatever we consider bad is to be avoided at almost all costs. Poverty, illness, danger. We assume that it's possible to live a life with less bad and more good, not only through what we do ourselves, but overall  - as a group or society - and part of our job as humans is to tip the balance toward the good whenever we have a chance. Whether or not we think that goodness will alter a fate that extends beyond our physical life or not, this trend toward goodness is something to be desired and if our beliefs tend in the direction of a heaven, well then, there is an opportunity for all goodness to be realized.

The Circle 

Known as yin-yang, this is an Eastern or Asian view of the world in which all things in the universe consist of complementary, opposing forces in constant flux. These forces are unavoidable and interdependent, that is, one cannot exist without the other so that good and evil operate together necessarily and are not usually associated with  the same intensity of value judgement as they do in the Arrow model. 

This model also does not have any definite beginning or end. There is no Garden of Eden here, no Second Coming. The cycle, samsara, simply repeats until the individual gradually navigates their way into perfect communion with an awareness free from all suffering. That communion, that place of liberation, is called Nirvana and is reached in much the same way as is heaven: ethical living, mindfulness, and the wisdom gained by them. What this view does avoid is the struggle to right wrongs since what we might often call wrongs are a necessary and functional part of living that we have to learn to navigate to get where we want to go. 

Not the Same, But Not Completely Different

We're pretty much born into one of these worldviews. It's pretty hard for someone born in the U.S., like me, to think about things the way a Buddhist or a Taoist would. Most of us grew up balancing the voices between the bickering angel on our right shoulder and the nasty little devil on our left. The idea that those two rascals don't exist, that my ideas of good and evil are pretty much irrelevant, that there is no heaven or hell, well, that's a reach. But it also makes sense in a way because we know from experience that suffering can hone us to sharpness and difficulty can breed a kind of wisdom that ease never does. That they should need each other to make us the best we can be may not be so crazy after all. 

As for me, I like the idea of working to make this world a better place but at the same time the thought of floating off into an egoless Nirvana where good and evil don't matter anymore sounds pretty appealing, too. Maybe like you, I don't exactly know what will happen when I shrug off my physical body, but until then, Donkey has some good advice:

Images: ergo blog, jade dragon school

No Clocks in Eden

 

Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway, decided in 2019 to get rid of all of its clocks. Anyone traveling there will find a land whose summer sun shines all day long and whose 300+ inhabitants are free to swim Caribbean blue waters or laze on sand beaches in the middle of the night because, well, nobody there cares what time it is. 

Just Imagine

Look around. Right now. How many devices do you use to tell you the time? I have two in the room I'm in and another in the room next door. I look at them constantly, even when the time doesn't matter. Like now. It's a kind of reflex, a way of grounding myself. If I know the time, I've got a handle on the world. 

But that's not true.

Of all of the constructs of man, time is one of the most insidious. We're either early or behind. We're constantly being measured by it. We worry about how much time something takes, or whether we have time to do this or that. We hurry through nearly everything to make sure we can fit it all in. If we didn't care about time, we would never have to be busy in the same way. We wouldn't constantly be rushing past people or things of ordinary beauty. We might finally be able to stop and SEE.

Time and the Spirit

It's not just the clock that's the problem. The clock is just a natural extension of the idea of time in the macro. It's looking at life in terms of what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It's the concepts of past and future. That's time, too. 

We often talk about the importance of living in the NOW, being present for life's events as they occur as if that's all we have because, well, it IS all we have. The concept of time, the idea that we can in some way hold on to or influence what has already happened or what has not yet happened hogties our life. It is the origin of both regret and fear. Without time, we wouldn't give yesterday or tomorrow a second thought and they don't deserve it.

Time and Eternity

God, who made us, lives beyond time. Everything in His consciousness is happening right now, to everyone everywhere. Every person who lived, every person who will ever live, you and me, are equally present to Him every second. Time, the hours of it and the passage of it, are an entirely human concept and the more we tie ourselves to the idea that time is real (it isn't), the farther we put ourselves away from God. 

Do you really think God put clocks in Eden? Of course He didn't. Nobody needed them. Those walks He took with Adam in the cool of the day had no limit, no recorded beginning or end. Their union was without any kind of limit, time or otherwise. 

Hmmm...  I stopped setting my alarm clock about 40 years ago, but darn. Looks like I didn't go far enough. Those folks on Sommarøy might be on to something. 

Image: Islands

Suffering, Self, and What to Do With Them

 

Who was the Buddha?

The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only. 

The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana. 

He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him. 

Sounds Pretty Good to Me

I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble. 

It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.

Die to Self

The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them. 

In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness. 

How to Be Human and Happy

There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes. 

Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus. 

I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.

The Alternatives

It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana. 

There is a kind of happiness in either path.

I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10

image: owlcation